I'm fairly upset that in at least a half year I haven't managed to get rid of these mini freezes which interrupt practically everything. They are particularly annoying while typing. In the middle of typing the computer stops responding for the duration of say, 5 to 10 letters which then appear suddenly after the freeze ends. It's even worse when using backspace or delete, where I suddenly find myself having deleted way too many characters.

I don't see any point in describing my speculations. I've made ample effort to track this down and verbosely described my problem to a lot of people and ended up without any progress at all!

I want to get rid of this. I'm short before removing Gentoo in order to be able to type again, this becomes unbearable!

Last edited by ManDay on Fri Mar 01, 2013 1:47 pm; edited 1 time in total

...I don't see any point in describing my speculations. I've made ample effort to track this down and verbosely described my problem to a lot of people and ended up without any progress at all!

By all means, don't tell us anything about what you've tried. Make us lead you through all the avenues you've already explored. Make your volunteer, unpaid helpers work harder. That'll work.

- John

My only hope is that the description of mini freezes rings the bell for someone. I haven't tried anything definite. I played arround with the scheduler options in the kernel, tried pinning it down to a certain process, all of which failed. I require your help from scratch, everything else would be misleading to say.

So, I suppose you tried to configure the timer to 1000 hz in the kernel (CONFIG_HZ_1000=y CONFIG_HZ=1000) to have the fastest response for desktop. It haven't help.

When you type on keyboard when the system is idle, do you have those mini freezes? Is it only appen when the CPU usage is high? Does it appen in X or/and in console? What is the repeat rate and delay you use on keyboard? Is there some possibilities that the hardware is in fault?

According to what you said, you tried to renice the processes or something like that to give an higher priority to what you do. Tell us other conditions where mini freezes arrived than when typing on keyboard.

Mini freezes are not specific to Gentoo. They can come from bugs that force the kernel to loop due to hung tasks. You can configure the kernel to detect soft and hard lockups in the Kernel hacking section._________________Paul

I can say with absolute certainty that the freezes occur on minimal CPU usage, in X and it TTY. However, it occured to me that I can't recall having seen them anywhere outside of VIM and GVIM (I originally said I had noticed them elsewhere - at least I can't reproduce that right now). So perhaps this is a vim issue? Though I don't have anything out of the ordinary in my VIM config and no scripts, whatsoever. Just

Code:

USE="-* +gpm +nls"

I've got the impression that this happens when the CPU is under little load.

.config has

Code:

CONFIG_HZ_1000=y
CONFIG_HZ=1000
# CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE is not set

Owing to the fellas on #vim I (they) were able to figure this out. It's that vim forces flushing to the swap-file in the main thread with fsync( ) so it's blocking until the swap file is flushed. Disabling fswap with :set swapsync= will not make vim block and instead rely on the FS to do the flushing at a appropriate times._________________⇨ PDF for documents is misused. Use HTML!
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